Live wooly mammoths are one step closer to reality

Someone better call Ben Stiller, because history could soon be coming back to life. This week, Texas-based startup Colossal Biosciences announced a key breakthrough in its quest to create replicas of the extinct wooly mammoth and reintroduce them to the Arctic tundra.

First things first: Colossal isn’t technically planning to bring back the wooly mammoth. While the genomes of several frozen mammoths have been sequenced, there are major gaps which prevent exact mammoth clones from being made.

• Instead, the startup aims to create a new species of cold-resistant elephant that Colossal says will feature “all the core biological traits of the wooly mammoth,” including a coat of fuzzy fur and a layer of blubber.

So, what was the breakthrough? Colossal managed to successfully reprogram Asian elephant cells into a kind of stem cell that can turn into every other cell type. This process previously worked in humans, monkeys, and leopards – but had proven difficult to replicate in elephants due to their natural cancer resistance.

• It marks a significant first step towards Colossal’s plan to create gene-edited embryos of mammoth-like elephants.
• The overall process involves editing elephant cells for the proper genes, turning those elephant cells into stem cells, and finally transforming them into egg and sperm cells.

👀 Looking ahead… Colossal, which is currently valued at $1.5 billion, also has future plans to bring back the dodo bird and the Tasmanian tiger.